existed, they were also seeing it bleed away into the volatile market and an insanely high cost of living. It was sad irony to make so much money while having the cost of bread rise right along with your income.
By the late nineties Yuriy had saved enough money to see his three grandchildren through university and into self-sustaining adulthood but not enough money to retire to that idyllic remote cottage on the Black Sea he’d been dreaming about for twenty years.
The opportunities came, slowly at first and then with more regularity, just before, and then after, the events of September 11. On that morning America awoke to a fact the KGB and many non-Western intelligence services had long known: Islamic fundamentalists had declared war on America and her allies. Unfortunately for the United States, these fundamentalists had in the last half-decade evolved from the disorganized and irrational madmen they were so often depicted as in Western newspapers to organized, trained soldiers with a clear goal. Worse still, they had learned the value of intelligence networks, agent recruitment, and communication protocols, all things that had traditionally been advantages at the sole disposal of national intelligence agencies.
For all her achievements and boons, America was the archetypical giant, blithely ignoring arrows and stones in favor of the notional cannon on the horizon, the mini-9/11s that were few and far between, and impossible to quickly consign to the back pages of The New York Times or off the fifteen-minute rotation at MSNBC or CNN. Historians would forever be arguing whether American intelligence could have or should have heard the galloping hoofbeats of 9/11, but the escalation certainly could have been tracked, going as far back as the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, up through the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kenya and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Only to the CIA had these been isolated incidents; to the affiliated terrorist cells that had carried them out, they’d been battles within a war. It was only when war had been loudly declared on the United States—in both word and deed—that the U.S. intelligence community started to realize these arrows and stones could not be ignored.
Worse still, the U.S. government and CIA had only in recent years steered themselves away from what Yuriy had dubbed the “golem mind-set”—the obsessive focus on the enemy giant’s head while ignoring its fingers and toes. Of course, that would never fully change, especially when it came to Public Enemy Number One, the Emir, who had become by design as much as by default, Yuriy believed, American’s golem. Nations needed definable enemies, someone they could point to and cry “danger!”
Of course, Yuriy had little to complain about. Like so many of his countrymen, he’d benefited from this new war—though only recently, and with much reluctance and not a little regret. Starting in the mid-1990s, cash-bloated Islamic fundamentalist groups had begun knocking on Russia’s door, seeking to hire errant intelligence officers, nuclear scientists, and Special Forces soldiers. Like so many of his countrymen, Yuriy had answered the door, but he was old and tired, and needed only a bit more money for that Black Sea cottage. With luck, tonight’s meeting would solve that issue.
Yuriy shook himself from his reverie, stepped back from the railing, and continued across the bridge, then down two more blocks to a neon-lit restaurant bearing the name Chiaka in both Arabic and Cyrillic. He crossed the street and found a park bench in the blind spot between a pair of streetlights, then sat down and watched. He lifted his collar against the wind and shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of his greatcoat.
Chiaka was a Chechnyan restaurant, locally owned and operated by a Muslim family who’d thrived under the aegis of the Obshina, or Chechen Mafia. Similarly, the man he was meeting—known to him only as Nima—had likely slipped into Russia by the graces of the Obshina. No matter, Yuriy reminded himself. He’d dealt with the man twice before, once to consult on a relocation of what they had called an “associate,” and more recently as an intermediary for a recruitment. That one had been an interesting affair. What these men wanted with a woman of that particular caliber he had no idea, and he didn’t care. He’d learned long ago to stifle such curiosity.
He watched for another twenty minutes before satisfying himself that nothing seemed out of place. No watchers about, police or otherwise. He stood up and crossed